This 107th episode is titled, “Reform Around the Edges.”It’s difficult living in the Modern World to understand the Late Medieval norm that a State had to have a single religion all its subjects observed. You’d be hard pressed to find a European of the 16th C who didn’t assume this to be the case. About the only group who didn’t see it that way were the Anabaptists. And even among them there were small groups, like the extremists who tried to set up the New Jerusalem at Munster, who did advocate a State Church. Mainstream Anabaptists advocated religious tolerance, but were persecuted for that stance.As we’ve seen in the story of the Church in Germany and as was hammered out in the Peace of Augsburg, peace was secured by deciding some regions would be Lutheran, others Catholic by the principle of cujus regis eius religio [coo-yoos regio / ay-oos rel-i-gio] meaning, “Whose realm, whose religion.” The religion of a region’s ruler determined that regions subjects’ religion. Under Augsburg, people were supposed to be free to relocate to another region if a ruler’s religion didn’t square with their convictions.Sounds simple enough >> for moderns who are highly mobile and have little sense of the historic connection between identity and place. Many think nothing today of packing up and moving to a new place across town, or across a state, nation, or even some other part of the globe. Not so most Europeans for most of their history. Personal identity was intimately connected to family. And Family was identified by location. That’s why long before people had surnames, they were identified by their town. John of Locksley. William of Orange. Fred of Fillsbury. Families built a house and lived in it for many generations. Losing that home to whatever cause was one of the great tragedies that could befall one. It was a betrayal of previous generations who’d handed down both a family name and home, as well as all those future generations who now would have no home to call their own.On the surface, the Peace of Augsburg sounded like a sound solution to the religious conflicts that raged after the Reformation. But it was in fact, a highly disruptive force that ultimately helped spark the Thirty Years War.The wars of religion that washed over Europe in general and France in particular is evidence that the rule a region could have but one religion wasn’t workable. Even the Edict of Nantes, passed by French King Henry IV after the bloody St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, only guaranteed the survival of French Protestantism by granting a number of Protestant cities as enclaves in an otherwise Roman Catholic realm.We’ve given a thumbnail sketch of the spread of the Reformation over Germany, France, England, Scotland, the Low Countries and in Scandinavian.Let’s take a look now at Spain.Before the Reformation reached the Iberian Peninsula, many hoped the Spanish Church would lead the way in long-overdue reform. Queen Isabella’s faith was earnest. She and Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros implemented a massive reform—including a renewal of biblical studies centered on the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Today a polyglot is known as a parallel Bible, where multiple versions of the bible are arranged in side-by-side columns for comparison. But in parallel Biblr, these version are all the same language. A polyglot is the comparison of different languages. The Complutensian Polyglot had the Hebrew, Latin and Greek texts of the OT as well as the Aramaic of the Torah. The NT was both Greek and Latin. Spain also had many humanists scholars similar to Erasmus—some of them in high places—who longed for reform.The arrival of the Protestant Reformation saw attitudes in Spain changed. At Worms, the upstart monk Martin Luther defied Emperor Charles V, who just happened to be King Charles I of Spain. Charles became the champion of opposition to Protestantism. The Spanish Inquisition, previously aimed at Jews and occultists, turned